A member of the fraternity of Ducks with Super Bowl rings and an assistant coach for the Central European Football League’s Vukovi Beograd, Reuben Droughns got his start in the Oregon backfield in the late 1990s before he was picked up in the third round of the 2000 NFL draft by Detroit. His 2,058 career yards was good enough for sixth on Oregon’s all-time list before the Ducks’ series of superstar running backs in the 2000s knocked him off the top ten list. That number might have been considerably higher too, had he not missed much of his junior year with a broken fibula suffered against UCLA.
In his second and final season in Eugene, the junior college transfer had a stellar senior season total of 1,307 yards, the fifth most in school history, and was second only to Saladin McCullough at the time.
Droughns was a journeyman in the NFL, seeing the field for five different teams between 2000 and 2008. Droughns had back-to-back 1,000 yard seasons in 2004 and 2005 for the Broncos and Browns before being traded to the Giants where he bounced around the depth chart, eventually becoming the team’s third down back before he was released in 2009.